interactiveleaf

skygoesgrey

I Used To Be Straight

angry_asian_man

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/angryasianman/hMam/~3/fgyW8oUXaMY/listener-chinatown-episode.html

atrios

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/RLYAoFhHyRk/i-guess-it-was-off-record-grope.html

jaienviedetoi
ohnotheydidnt

The 37-year-old actor plans to stay in a Plexiglas box above the Madison Square Garden marquee on Tuesday and Wednesday to raise $250,000 for Feeding America, the nation's largest domestic hunger relief charity. He'll stay in the box each day for about eight hours.

Donations can come on site or through text messages or a Facebook page set up by Mars Inc., the company that makes Snickers candy bars.

A Mars spokesman says Arquette will eat during his two-day stay in the plastic enclosure.

Arquette starred in the "Scream" movie franchise.

jasmina12345
ohnotheydidnt

Oops! She did it again. Miley Cyrus has stirred up controversy with another raunchy magazine photo shoot. This time, the 16-year-old has traded the bed-head, sheet-wrapped look of her Vanity Fair photos for tight cleavage-boosting leather on the cover of Elle magazine, alongside the declaration that "she's not a kid anymore." Inside the August issue she's pictured reclining on a table wearing sexy thigh-high "hooker boots," as one blogger put it. Just as with the Annie Leibovitz shots of last year, some folks are downright apoplectic. So begins yet another chapter in our tome of hypocrisy toward young female sexuality.

The outrage has so little to do with her being sexualized and everything to do with the way she's being sexualized. We're all too happy to see her clad in a girly frock and schoolgirl socks -- however, black thigh-high boots, and a black pushup bra? Horrors, that's a child! But in both cases she's an eroticized 16-year-old celebrity who has been very successfully marketed and sold to the masses. It's the straightforwardness of the sexual imagery in the Elle photos that trips our cultural inappropriateness alarm. Instead of sexualizing her childlike innocence and naiveté, it pictures her as a sexually motivated and experienced teenager (similar to the apparently outrageous bedsheet photo). Miley has crossed that fine cultural line between sexy purity and sexiness that is actually sexual.

It's like we've burst in on her in the dressing room of Victoria's Secret while she's practicing seductive poses in the mirror; she's gone for everything lacy and black and tight, the most overwrought and obvious sexual signaling available. Or, as Salon's Sarah Hepola exclaimed to me: "Those are the boots of a 38-year-old woman in midlife crisis!" That isn't to tease her -- hell, who hasn't been there and done that? Girls often strut down the runway to womanhood dressed as a caricature of adult sexuality, stumbling and tugging at ill-fitting clothes and errant bra straps as they go. Unlike Miley, though, most of us are lucky enough to not have it broadcast for, and sold to, the whole of America.

My first reaction to the photos wasn't horror or outrage, I simply thought: I hope she's ready for what the world has in store for her. After all, the special word so often reserved for the accidentally sexy schoolgirl who starts actively and boldly embracing her sexuality? Slut.

source


I know this pic has been posted before, but I thought this was kind of an interesting article. I don't know, I think that  all the things that she does (like taking provocative pictures of herself) wouldn't be as overblown if the image that she represents and markets wasn't such a contradiction to all the things she does.

tempest_omouthy
thequestionclub

"Stereotypes are meant to be entertaining."

metafilter

http://www.metafilter.com/83171/Photographs-of-the-Excitement-of-Geotechnical-Engineering-Failures

daily_kos

http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/uTtbqH4WAO4/-McCain-camp-ordered-Palin-to-use-palling-around-line

Via Marc Ambinder, check out this e-mail from McCain campaign aide Nicolle Wallace to Sarah Palin, dated October 4, 2008 -- before Palin's infamous "palling around with terrorists" attack line:

Governor and Team:

rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this.

The line they suggested:

This is not a man who sees American as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.

Here's the line Palin delivered:

Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.

Ambinder got his hands on the e-mails from an advance copy of a new book on the 2008 campaign by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson of The Washington Post.

This seems sure to spark another blaze between Palin's defenders -- who will claim this as a vindication, that she is in fact a loyal Republican teamplayer -- and her detractors, who have tried to pin John McCain's loss on her shoulders.

At the end of the day, Palin still must take responsibility for delivering the line, but it's valuable to know that she wasn't going rogue -- she was following orders from the HQ. She deserves all the grief she's gotten for delivering the line, but so to do John McCain and the GOP operatives who ran his campaign.

daily_kos

http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/2S-aMR75IiY/-IL-Sen:-The-Republican-Purity-Crusade-Strikes-Again

Golly, it seems like eons ago, but checking up on it, it was less than forty-eight hours ago that I wrote this:

Needless to say, for the NRSC and the Republicans in Washington, Kirk is preferable to whatever second-string state legislator the party could have persuaded to run.

Turns out, the veracity of that statement can now be called into question:

Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk (R) will not run for the open seat of Sen. Roland Burris (D) in 2010, a stunning reversal from just 48 hours ago when Kirk signaled to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) that he would make the race.

Kirk's decision...followed a meeting of the Illinois Republican congressional delegation on Thursday in which his colleagues refused to back Kirk in a primary against Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna due, in large part, to his vote in favor of President Barack Obama's climate change bill.

So, to recap: Kirk's own House colleagues, whom he has worked alongside for the better part of a decade, were unwilling to stand by him because he sided with the President ONCE. Kirk dutifully joined the party of NO on the stimulus, badmouthed the President to the Chinese, and voted against the budget.

Not good enough. He had one brief moment of independence. And in the Republican Party, even in a blue state like Illinois where occasional apostasy from the GOP party line might be a prerequisite, independence is not to be tolerated.

This is stunning, because Kirk seemed to be the GOP's only chance at political redemption here. With Lisa Madigan out of the mix, Kirk was a Republican whose occasional bipartisanship (and it is only occasional) might have kept him close to the Democratic nominee. Recent polling bore this out: Kirk might not have been leading presumptive Democratic frontrunner Alexi Giannoulias, but he was either tied or slightly trailing. Within striking distance.

This incessant Republican crusade for absolute and total ideological purity is an awesome sight to behold. When your polling numbers are circling the drain, and 72% of voters have a negative opinion of your party, one might not expect such insistence on strict adherence to a thoroughly rejected political worldview.

Alas, for Mark Kirk, it was not to be so. Now, Andy McKenna, a former state chairman of the Illinois GOP, will be the almost certain nominee against Giannoulias (or, alternatively, one of the other host of Democrats eyeing the race). Kirk's loss is certainly the Democratic Party's gain.

It is mystifying to think, of course, that the Illinois GOP has deluded itself into thinking that it was also in THEIR party's best interests.

UPDATE (1:37 PM PT): Cilizza is now walking his report back, but only a little bit:

Although Kirk has already told several national Republicans today that he will not run for the Senate, there is an ongoing effort now to convince him to re-think that decision, according to several sources close to the discussions.

(hat tip: NU Fan)

curbed

http://curbed.com/archives/2009/07/10/comment_of_the_day.php

"No way would I pay over $4 mil for a townhouse on Washington Square until they do something about my worst nightmare, those damned uncomfortable benches."—Sai Baba [Battle of the PriceChopped Washington Place Townhouses!]

curbed

http://curbed.com/archives/2009/07/10/curbedwire_east_villages_townhousetobe_whole_foods_not_done_with_gowanus_quite_yet.php

EAST VILLAGE—A couple weeks back we heard that rising design superstars Sixx Design—aka the Novorgratz clan—would be designing a 3,000-square-foot duplex atop a new East Village townhouse at 238 East 4th Street (between Avenues A and B), expected to hit the market at $4 million. We recently stopped by the site, former home to a one-story commercial building (it was purchased in May '08 for $3.5 million, and noticed construction of the six-story, 25-foot-wide house is well underway. The owner, design writer Sue Hosteler, plans to live on the first four floors. [CurbedWire Staff]

GOWANUS—A Whole Foods rep chimes in with a comment on yesterday's news that the grocery store is abandoning its long-stalled plans to open a market on Third Avenue: "Contrary to this story, Whole Foods Market continues to pursue plans for a future store at the Gowanus site in Brooklyn. Our spokesperson’s statement that we have 'no immediate plans' to open a store DOES NOT mean that we are not actively progressing towards plans for development. Since the fall, we have been working to identify potential development partners for a Brooklyn store. In making these plans, nothing has been finalized and we can’t provide extra details yet, but we'll let everybody know when there are further developments to report." [CurbedWire Inbox]

talkngptsmemo

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/fsgjO0yYJ60/heir_to_burris.php

Is Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) running for the Senate in 2010 or not?

talkngptsmemo

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/Zaxbkmswgqw/still_writing_this_chapter_of_bush_years.php

Spencer Ackerman is plowing through the joint IGs' report on domestic surveillance that was just released. Among the conclusions he's finding in the report: most leads secured by the secret surveillance program were determined not to have any connection to terrorism and -- surprise!--then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' July 2007 testimony to Congress about the surveillance program was "confusing, inaccurate, and ... had the effect of misleading."

In addition to detailing how the White House (read: Cheney) basically turned John Yoo into a one-man OLC, the report also explains how the White House (Cheney again?) directed the CIA to provide the factual underpinnings to the President's "legal" authorizations. Again no surprise, but let's note for the record that this whole operation was run from the very top.

Late Update: Another aspect of this also has Cheney's fingerprints all over it: Once DOJ began objecting to the program (that is, once anyone beyond Yoo at DOJ learned of it), those objections were kept from President Bush by White House staff, at least according to Bush.

atrios

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/x4W3pkJtzns/i-wonder-what-it-was-all-about-then.html

atrios

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/N_tqPQdI3_Y/wankers-divided.html

A band of 22 New Democrat and Blue Dog lawmakers say they support a “robust” government-run health plan, boosting chances of moving healthcare reform with a public insurance plan through the House.

boing_boing

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/13HxnWaOS7w/uighur-crisis-in-xin-1.html

♦ Image above, from an extensive Boston Globe photo-essay which contains some graphic content: "An ethnic Uighur woman looks out the window of an apartment one day after Han Chinese mobs attacked the compound in Urumqi, China on Wednesday, July 8, 2009. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)"

♦ From China's state mouthpiece, People's Daily, calls to "punish Facebook" (I'm visualizing stern, uniformed Communist party officials publicly spanking Zuckerberg). Snip: "Over 90 percent of (...) netizens said that 'Xinjiang independence' activists, carrying out this type of 'online activity' severely violates China's national interests and agreed that Facebook should immediately shut down the 'Xinjiang independence" online group."

♦ Xinhua would like you to know that everything is "normal again" in the capital city of Urumqi, and that people are happily wandering the streets in search of watermelon, kebabs, and eggplant.

♦ Reuters: "Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Friday genocide was being committed in China's northwest province of Xinjiang and called on Chinese authorities to intervene to prevent more deaths."

♦ CSM on China's savvier media strategy: "Taking a cue from Western PR tactics, Beijing moved away from trying to block coverage altogether - and was benefited by doing so."

♦ A report filed nearly 10 years ago by Rebecca MacKinnon, then CNN's Beijing bureau chief: "Rumblings of discontent among ethnic Muslims on China's Asian frontier"

♦ NYT reports the crackdown now extends to mosques: "Chinese authorities banned prayer gatherings at mosques here on Friday, the principal day of prayer for Muslims, as security officials tried to prevent further ethnic violence in the Xinjiang region."

(most links in this post via Rebecca MacKinnon)

boing_boing

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/2u-aZWD2wrs/afghanistan-us-disco.html

During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, an incident occured in which hundreds or thousands of Taliban POWs were killed by a warlord supported by the US.

Bush administration officials repeatedly thwarted efforts to investigate the mass killing, according to American officials and human rights groups. The warlord responsible, Abdul Rashid Dostum (shown above while campaigning for president in 2004), still retains a high position within the Afghan government. How (and if) the Obama administration will deal with ongoing calls for an investigation remains to be seen. Snip from NYT article today by James Risen:

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation -- sought by officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Red Cross and other human rights groups -- because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported Karzai government, in which General Dostum has served as a defense official.

"At the White House, nobody said 'no' to an investigation, but nobody ever said 'yes,' either," said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. "The first reaction of everybody there was 'Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.' " It is not clear how -- or if -- the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration may not be hostile to an inquiry.

Incidentally: Wikipedia says Mr. Dostum is also known as "Heavy D, and D-Diddy," and links to a subscribers-only National Geographic article as proof.

boing_boing

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/aT6FBrQDCM0/3d-radiology-images.html

The Stanford Radiology 3D Imaging Laboratory uses computed tomography and Magnetic Resonance imaging data to create three-dimensional images of the human body. Individual CT and MR scans of the body are taken around a single axis that are stacked and rendered using complex computer algorithms to create a three-dimensional volume of data. The images produced from this data can be manipulated on-screen to provide doctors with unique interior perspectives of the human body for diagnosing and treating patients. Each month the lab produces nearly 20,000 images.

wonkette

http://wonkabout.com/409638/marion-barry-dresses-up-like-a-lady-commits-heist-of-the-milenium/?from=wonkette_post

http://wonkette.com/?p=409638

D.C. is the capital of many things, not just Virginia. For instance, it’s a major destination for senseless violence, and it’s also a “must-visit” for any tourist looking to snag a little “Capitol Hill Dome,” in exchange for a crack pebble. Yes, this is a miserable city. But sometimes — not often, but now and then — something magic happens. Like when three transvestites mug a woman, and then use her credit card to buy panties at Victoria’s Secret. Oh wait, this happened in Fredericksburg. Nevermind. [Washington Examiner] (more…)

• Allow us to pin a ribbon to your tunic, DCist, for you have displayed great diligence in your endeavor to obtain pictures of the Real World cast, pictures you probably lifted from Alex Kozinski’s website, but whatever. Just remember: you may have won this battle, but the website with the first photographs of a Love Sack wins the war. [DCist]
• Zounds! Not all red-badge-wearers are Hill interns! Some are “unshaven” contractors that make “at least twice as much” as staffers do. Wasn’t Blackwater disbanded? Scandal! [Spotted: DC Interns AND CONTRACTORS]
• A question for the bookworms who took AP Soviet History in high school: what did Stalin do just days before ordering his ice axe assassins to murder FDR? If you answered, “He closed all the golf courses,” you get college credit. Get outraged, Montgomery County! [Washington Examiner]
• Bike Harassment. It’s real. [Holla Back DC]

wonkette

http://wonkette.com/409788/peggy-noonan-chastiseth-thine-wolf-childe-sarah-palin

http://wonkette.com/?p=409788

Thursdayington, July Nintheth. Sky Princess Peggington Noonington, famous to children for her sparkling, weekly collection-of-paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal business pamphlet, looks at the Street, 100 miles beneath her Park Avenue Penthouse. She seeth seven Motorcars velocitating through an Intersection of Roads, but no Mexicans. (One time, Peggy Noonan saw a Mexican.) Seven, an odd number: it meaneth, “Tonightington, I disliketh Sarah Palin, the Wolf-Childe, in my Writings of Politick.” Snort ye line of pepper and typeth, Peggington, for those who dareth Read.

Which is to say that Peggy Noonan’s column this week “makes fun of Trig Palin for having Down Syndrome,” in Internet jargon — in English, this translates to “criticizes Sarah Palin.” It’s a feisty, determined Madame we have this week. Perhaps, as scholar David Denby would put it, Peggy Noonan is a woman and Sarah Palin is a woman and one does not like the other, because of Vaginas?

So terse today, anywho! More Brooklyn than Britain, one might sayington, w/r/t the two places Peggy Noonan was born, simultaneously:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

More (-ington):

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

“She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it’s included in U.S. News and World Report’s top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named “Abe,” and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn’t need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

“She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism.

“Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!

“The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

BAM BAM BAMMINGTON, SMACK, you’re nuts, Noonan, you’re nuts! Ha ha ha such an awesome column; too bad she will get sued by Meg Stapleton, on Twitter. THE CHILD HAS SPECIAL NEEDS, PEGGY.

A Farewell to Harms [WSJ]

538dotcom

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/in-illinois-dems-dodge-bullet-gop.html

Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk (R) will not run for the open seat of Sen. Roland Burris (D) in 2010, a stunning reversal from just 48 hours ago when Kirk signaled to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) that he would make the race.

Kirk's decision [...] followed a meeting of the Illinois Republican congressional delegation on Thursday in which his colleagues refused to back Kirk in a primary against Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna due, in large part, to his vote in favor of President Barack Obama's climate change bill.

metafilter

http://www.metafilter.com/83170/Deciding-to-sell-but-not-die